In this survey of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century texts in
English we shall use the concept of “contact” between
separate groups as a frame for our studies. The most obvious way in
which this concept applies to the literatures of the
period is in terms of their representations of new contacts with non-
European peoples such as Africans and natives of the
Americas. We’ll examine texts produced in those colonial encounters,
from records of voyages of discovery to novels
about interactions between historically and geographically separated
groups, including journals of Captain Cooke, Aphra
Behn’s Oroonoko, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and former
slave Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography. The term
“contact,” however, originated in the study of linguistics. We shall
also use the concept, then, to think about shifts in the
English language--including literary languages-- throughout these two
centuries.

As one of its foremost theorists Mary Louise Pratt has noted, a
contact language is an improvised language that develops
among speakers of different native languages. Yet we shall test
whether the notion of a “contact language” might be a
helpful way for thinking about the negotiations authors made as they
selected and chose among different registers of
English to construct a text. We’ll also investigate the “rise of
standard English” in this period--in dictionaries, periodicals,
and novels--and the relationship of standard English to the varieties
of English spoken and written in Britain at this time.
Thomas Sprat, Samuel Johnson, Addison and Steele, and Scots poets
Allan Ramsay, James MacPherson, and Robert
Burns will figure here.

Finally, we’ll make use of the notion of “contact” on a more general
level, to think about the ways in which separate
groups use writing to devise ongoing relationships with each other,
often under conditions of inequality. Here we’ll think
about three distinct sites of contact: men and women (including
Robert Herrick, Margaret Fell Fox, John Donne,
Katherine Philips, Mary Astell, Alexander Pope, Samuel Richardson,
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, et al), aristocrats
and “commoners,” (Samuel Pepys, Earl of Rochester, Delariviere
Manley, Stephen Duck, Mary Jones, Samuel Johnson,
Thomas Gray, William Blake, Thomas Paine), and supporters of the
Stewart monarchs and, after the civil war and
subsequent “bloodless” revolution, supporters of their replacements
(looking at excerpts from Civil War newsbooks,
Charles I, Andrew Marvell, John Dryden, John Milton, and John Locke).

Course requirements will include participation in this discussion-
oriented course, response papers, two long papers, a
midterm and final examination and one group presentation.